Author: NY TIMES

There’s a dreadful innocence to the tiny puppets that drive “Stopmotion,” an unusually resolute horror tale that places a spiraling animator at the mercy of her handmade figures and her own disturbed mind.Ella (Aisling Franciosi), a talented artist, is herself a puppet, forced to act as the hands of her fearsome mother (Stella Gonet), a storied animator who’s suffering from a degenerative disease.“I don’t have my own voice,” Ella complains, resentfully moving the dolls millimeter by millimeter on her mother’s barked instructions. But when tragedy frees Ella to make her own stop-motion film and she moves her materials into a…

Nestled in a dense forest, the Ukrainian military base appears abandoned and destroyed, its command center a burned-out husk, a casualty of a Russian missile barrage early in the war.But that is above ground.Not far away, a discreet passageway descends to a subterranean bunker where teams of Ukrainian soldiers track Russian spy satellites and eavesdrop on conversations between Russian commanders. On one screen, a red line followed the route of an explosive drone threading through Russian air defenses from a point in central Ukraine to a target in the Russian city of Rostov.The underground bunker, built to replace the destroyed…

The popular district of Kichijoji, in western Tokyo, is the place to hunt for vintage clothes and quirky antiques, enjoy drinks and food in the narrow alleyways called Harmonica Yokocho, or ride the swan boats in scenic Inokashira Park.Right at home in this buzzy area is a shop called Masa’s Pastime, specializing in antique pocket watches and repairs. But its founder and president, Masa Nakajima, has turned the business into more than a pastime over the years.And this spring he plans to introduce two iterations of an original watch — not yet named — that he created with his team…

Zong Qinghou, a self-made beverage entrepreneur who was once the richest person in China, died on Sunday.His death was announced by his company, Wahaha Group, which said that Mr. Zong had died from an unspecified illness and gave his age as 79. The company statement provided no further details.Mr. Zong’s rags-to-riches story had made him prominent in China even before a public feud with his foreign business partner considerably raised his profile — and his wealth. He founded a beverage company in the 1980s, and in the 1990s, he partnered with Danone, the French food giant, to launch one of…

The latest intimate epic from the master filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan asks whether the world can change, and we can change with it. Source link

Amid a number of high-stakes elections to be held around the world this year, the East European nation of Belarus on Sunday offered an alternative to the unpredictability of democracy: a vote for Parliament without a single candidate critical of the country’s despotic leader.Opposition parties have all been banned — belonging to one is a crime — and the four approved parties taking part in the election have competed only to outdo each other in their displays of unwavering loyalty to the country’s leader, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist for 30 years.For the…

Priced at $73,000, the Polo 79 is to be produced in limited quantities, although exact numbers have not been determined; the brand said any orders made now will start to be fulfilled later this year.The first 150 buyers also will receive a silk satin jacket, a recreation of the one that Ursula Andress was wearing when she was photographed wearing a Polo wristwatch at a polo match in the mid-1980s in Palm Beach, Fla., accompanied by Yves G. Piaget, now the company’s chairman.The jackets are being made by AZ Factory, the fashion brand founded by Alber Elbaz shortly before his…

Home Depot must reinstate a worker who quit after they refused to remove a slogan supporting the Black Lives Matter movement from their apron, the National Labor Relations Board announced on Wednesday after it found that the worker’s actions were protected by federal law.The ruling by the National Labor Relations Board held that Home Depot violated federal law in 2021 when it told the worker that they must quit or remove the letters “BLM,” an acronym for Black Lives Matter, that they had drawn by hand onto their apron.The case is one of several that centered on the issue of…

And it has produced an unusual camaraderie among the cast, a product of the interdependence that circus requires. (You can’t really fly through the air unless you trust the people on the ground to catch you.) “In circus, we’re a bit lawless,” Carroll said. “But we’re also really collaborative.”There is joy in seeing a performer arc out over the audience and a heart-in-your-throat tension when an aerialist dangles by just a hand or a foot. “We have that new language, beside the acting and the dancing, to add a layer of danger, emotion, intensity,” said Alexandra Gaelle Royer, an aerialist…

For an Israeli settlement that has become such a resounding symbol of religious and right-wing politics in the West Bank, Homesh is not much to look at.Three families live in tarpaulin-covered shelters full of bunk beds for some 50 young men, who study in a yeshiva that is a shabby prefab structure surrounded by abandoned toys, building materials and garbage.They live part time here amid the ruins and rubbish of a hilltop settlement ripped down in 2005 by the Israeli army and police. It is one of four West Bank settlements dismantled when Israel pulled all of its troops and…